[Update] This article was only a proof of concept oriented towards developers. Please don't ask for help in order to use this script because it may not work at all.

When my cofounder at Bringr told me that Topsy new search engine was able to look at every tweet published since 2006 I immediately tried to search my username to see my first tweets.

What a horrible sight, my first tweets from 2007 were disastrous, both in grammar and in content. In France, we like to think that we believe in what I would translate as the right to be forgotten(Le droit à l'oubli), in short it's the right be protected from search engine indexing things we posted years ago. Because sometimes we publish things online that we'll regret some years later (just look at all those kids that share too much of their personal lives on Twitter or Facebook).

So while I was playing with Topsy, I looked at the network exchange and discovered Topsy own search api.

What's awesome about this endpoint is that perpage parameter allows to request more than 5000 tweets with just one call! I quickly wrote a (Java)Script (got it?) to download all those tweets and remove each one of them thanks to Twitter API own API. And it worked.